“Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.”
Source: Creative Is a Verb: If You're Alive, You're Creative
“What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113”
Source: The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
“I thought about TimeBlaze. We should...shorten the titles. The titles are getting long. More colons than a proctologist.”
Source: The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To
“When kings the sword of justice first lay down,
They are no kings, though they possess the crown.
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.”
Source: The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr
“Do not get tired of searching. If there’s anything to get tired of, it should be the act of counting the number of times you have searched without finding.”
“Maia screamed and woke.
'Serenity?' Cala's voice, Cala's angular shape outlined against the window.
' 'Tis an ironic title, in sooth,' Maia said feebly, realizing that the entangling garments of the nightmare were merely his bedsheets. His heart was hammering, and he was clammy with sweat.”
Source: The Goblin Emperor
“The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.”
Source: If on a winter's night a traveler
“Hiding behind titles to create security is insecurity.”
“Well, you know the form,’ Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.”
Source: Bring Up the Bodies
“The genuine mind of man, thirsting for its native home, society, contemns the gewgaws that separate him from it. Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand, to contract the sphere of man's felicity. He lives immured within the Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of man.”
Source: Rights of Man